TaningiaDanae said:
(I can just see Clem curled up in fetal position right now!)
Taningia,
Coiled like a feeding tentacle, more like it.
Thanks to Kevin (Architeuthoceras), I've been able to read "Jackal of the Deep," a supremely purple bit of prose by one Paul Annixter. In this short story, a female sperm whale engages in an epic wrestling match with an
über-squid. Annixter's description of the squid is worthy of a radio play:
This one was a giant of his kind. His mighty tentacles were as big around as flagpoles, each of them thirty-five feet long. They sprouted like the stalks of a turnip from a bleached and bulbous body fully as large as that of the cachalot, and shaped like a Zeppelin. The center of this grisly mass was a gaping, senile-looking mouth with an overhanging, parrot-like beak, on either side of which glared two lidless eyes of awful and appalling blackness.
Annixter's attempts to generate an aura of menace are undercut by his mingling of the dire (Zeppelin) and not-so-dire (turnip), and the dimensions of his "devilfish" are preposterous, but the story does have a fun pulp sensibility. Mama physeter amputates the squid's arms ("covered with round sucking discs, studded with black curved claws...") one by one, until the squid quits the scene and the whale is forced to surface before suffocating. Meanwhile, mama's calf is menaced by a spiteful pilot fish named Romero and his pal, a monstrous, 35-foot Grey Nurse shark.
Setting aside the squid's size and the dubious arrangement of its beak, Annixter describes something not unlike
Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, the colossal squid. His story has resonances with Benchley's "Beast," in which a sperm whale and her calf have a run-in with a falsified
Architeuthis, but also recalls an apocryphal tale in which a sperm whale calf is said to have been drowned and dragged under by a monster squid (while mama watched helplessly). I imagine young Peter Benchley reading Paul Annixter's story in his Benet-edited volumes, tucking the images away for future reference.
Clem